Category Archives: Games

“I Know This” is a game I made for the Global Game Jam 2015 along with Gavin McCarthy (art, design), Adam Axbey (sound effects) and Matthew Simmonds (4mat) (music); I did programming and design. The name we chose for the team was Two’s Complement.

Version 1.1 should clear all known bugs except for the seemingly rare “return does nothing” and the “redtext has HTML code in it” bugs which I can’t reproduce accurately at the moment. Let me know if there are new/other issues! And thanks for your patience.

Straight outta Isla Nublar

Remember that one scene in Jurassic Park? The one where Lex hacks the computer system in order to lock a door and protect everyone from the raptors, and exclaims…

That was basically the whole premise for our game.

When I saw the movie as a kid, that scene (and the file system UI that Lex “hacks”) always stuck with me as a quintessential faux-futuristic Hollywood representation of how computers work. I learned a bit later that this GUI was not made for the movie, but actually existed on SGI workstations and was ported to Linux as well, so it’s more legit than it looks! But in the end, it’s still a really great artifact of 90’s VR hopes and dreams, in which everything is better in 3D, even file browsers. (and Web browsers, too)

The Game

It starts with the same basic premise as the scene in the movie : you have to find a file. To make it more interesting than your average hidden object game, you need to hack specific Search Nodes (purple files) which, upon successful hacking, will help you narrow down which potential Golden Folder contains what you’re looking for. Don’t pick the wrong one though, all the other ones are full of viruses and bad stuff!
Fun fact : the filenames you’ll see in the game are lifted from your hard drive, and 8.3ified for formatting and retro-chic reasons!

Hacking involves mashing your keyboard until code appears, and hitting the return key where the line endings are, just like in real life. The hacking minigame was heavily inspired by hackertyper.net, a fantastic way to feel like you’re real good at making up C code on the fly. However, we gamified it (oh, the horror) by not letting you go further than line endings, and adding a timer.

As you hack (or fail to hack) search nodes, sentinels will spawn and start looking for you. If they catch you, they warp you back at the root folder. Not a huge punishment, but enough to make you at least a little careful.

And then there’s Clicky, your favourite Office Assistant ripoff. He means well, but he sometimes gets in the way… and hides a dark secret. :o

Closing Thoughts

I don’t know that the game really qualifies as a jam game, because I worked for many evenings after the jam to smooth out the rough edges, make better Clicky interactions, fix the endings and other various bugs. The party version of the game was without music, I asked 4mat to produce something for us after the fact, and we were so soso lucky to have him contribute the lovely tunes you can hear in the game.

This was also my first experience with Unity 5, but I barely touched what it can accomplish. I’d say that the Audio engine is really nice, ducking was painless to implement… and the new UI stuff (even if it’s 4.6 and not 5) was a joy to use compared to the old GUI system.

And Gavin is the best! First time jamming with him, and it was a great match of design sensibilities, work-mindedness and just plain fun. <3

The gameplay is a two-player cooperative physics sandbox and puzzle game. The objective for both players is to clear a path for Malisse as she walks on a sinuous path in the world through the looking glass…

A bunch of rabbits trail behind her, but they get scared easily! Everytime Malisse bumps into an object she cannot climb, a rabbit will run away, but you recover one rabbit for every level cleared. If all the rabbits are gone, Malisse ends up alone and … cries herself to death? That’s the end of that play session, anyway!
Otherwise, the levels are chosen randomly from a pool of 11 hastily-authored levels which vary in difficulty. If you get stuck early on your first attempt, definitely give it another shot since you might find more palatable challenges.

It was an interesting game jamming experience for me in many respects : first time with a 5-person team, first time implementing sprite animations in Unity (using 2D Toolkit), and first time writing a tool for use inside the Unity editor — a spline tool for drawing roads quickly. We also had interesting last-minute collision issues, since we wanted Malisse to be able to climb slopes but didn’t want to resort to rigid bodies to have that done automagically. Spherecasting to the rescue, and lots of debugging! ^_^

Pyramidwarf is a game I made in collaboration with Samuel Boucher (alias Monsieur Eurêka) with music by Stefan Boucher at the Global Game Jam 2014 in the TAG Lab of the Concordia University, in Montréal. The version you can download here is a tweaked, split-screen version of the “party build” you can find on the GGJ website.

We worked with Unity, as is the usual for me in game jams, and the initial idea was to make a stacking game where you’d either race the other player with a really unstable stack of little guys, or throw parts of your pyramid to the other player’s to break it up. And of course, this being a game jam, we didn’t do half of the stuff we planned for, and ended up with a super janky physics-based stacking game that happens to be silly enough to be fun!

On my side, it was my first time really exploiting Unity physics in a game. I’d done some basic rigid-body stuff and used character controllers (Volkenessen was physics based as well), but never hinges or physics-based multi-body animation. One of the fun/interesting parts to do under pressure was the walk animation using torque and impulses : the leg pushes itself up, angles up, the body gets a magical shove and the legs readjust themselves to stay upright. It’s definitely not physically correct, but it looks like a bunch of cardboard puppets and that’s exactly what we were going for!

To build the pyramid, dwarves need to go up somehow, and the way we solved that is just… teleportation. These little guys have magic on their side, and they can teleport to the first free spot of the pyramid to keep stacking up. This caused rigidbody overlapping problems that I sorta resolved by just testing a whole lot if something’s there before teleporting, and denying the move otherwise.

The “final 1.01″ build I posted here is not bug-free, but it’s shippable, so here goes. I might come back to it and fix rendering issues, and maybe implement dwarf-throwing, because it still sounds so great in my head.

RAIN+BOW is game I made with Devine Lu Linvega as Les Collégiennes during TOJam Sixy Times in 2011, and lay on the backburner for many years until it was resurrected for a showing at Gamercamp in 2013, this past weekend! We finally took the time to add polishing touches and add gamepad support, so I’m happy to release this version as the final public build!

What am I looking at?

RAIN+BOW is a bullet hell, or a shmup where you need to make your way through a sea of bullets and enemies and hopefully kill some of them in the process. There is no score tracking, but the game tracks how far you were able to get and remembers your highest “score” for this playthrough. You have no health; a single bullet hitting your head will kill you, but as is usual in those kind of games, the hitbox is much smaller than the character.

There are three weapons at your disposal :

RAIN (-) : The “machine gun” continuous firing weapon, which does little damage but will grind away at oncoming enemies

CROSS (+) : The auto-guided missiles, which you can’t aim but will target nearby enemies and will clear up enemies behind you

BOW (|) : The laser weapon, which does take its time to charge but inflicts major damage, especially effective against blue “shield” enemies and columns of weaker enemies

Sometimes you’ll see an orange cat presenting you a power-up for one of your weapons; definitely kill that guy and grab the powerup to get a more effective firing rate and effectiveness, and if you reach level 3, a temporary ultra-powerful rainbow firing mode for that weapon.

You might think that spamming all three weapons at once is a good idea, but the firing rate is halved for every simultaneous weapon, which means you should prioritize the one you think is best suited for the situation, and fire off CROSS missiles every once in a while.

RAIN+BOW was made in Unity, with the models made in Cinema4D by Devine, and original music also created on the jam site by him back in 2011. It doesn’t use textures at all (all flat-coloured materials), and we even avoided transparency in favour of rapidly flashing entities on and off, to give an even more psychedelic and retro-arcadey feel to the game.
The levels are randomly generated based on predefined “events” that are presented in a random order, with some variation, in a very simplistic Spelunky-like way. Game difficulty varies wildly because the algorithms for level generation are quite crude, but it ends up being challenging and fun every time, which is what counts,… right?

In its PoA demo form, it used the same crude networking code as The Cloud Is A Lie, which requires two computers plugged in the same LAN or ideally directly by a cross-wired ethernet cable. Releasing that particular version publicly made little sense, so we decided to make a much more extensive multiplayer version.

This game’s name might remind you of another Prince of Arcade game, this one in 2010 — Pico³. It’s the same basic idea of playing with colors, mixing and matching them, but this time in a competitive versus environment.

How To Play

Upon launching the game, you will find yourself in the Lobby, a temporary haven. You should look for an hexagon floating about the edges of your screen (right click drag to rotate around the planet) and click on it to practice against the AI. You might see circles too, they are other players and could challenge you as soon as you raise your shield.

To protect yourself against incoming attacks, find the patch of dirt marked by a black & white circle, and connect a node to it. The shield will light up, eating away at the incoming bullets with a similar hue. In the lobby, you are invisible to potential attackers as long as your shield is unpowered.

To win against your opponent, locate a patch of mushrooms and connect nodes to it — this is your cannon. It needs a minimum amount of power to be able to fire, and based on the incoming nodes, will fire bullets of various sizes and colours; easier or harder to defend against. The idea being to match the colour of incoming bullets with your shield, and to differ as much as possible from the opponent’s shield colour (which is indicated by the contour of his circular icon) with your cannon’s bullets.

Pico Battle is an entirely wordless game, and might seem offputting or hard to grasp at first. In the lobby, a robotic voice will explain the basics of the game, and take your time there to experiment with the controls and the scarce UI elements. As you get familiar with the game and its interface, you will discover strategies and enjoy it even more.

Updates

04/07/2012 — Version 1.1

Fixed bug where the AI wouldn’t defend itself if it is challenged too quickly

Updated 15/06/2012!
See bottom of the post for updated download links.

Diluvium is a game I made with Aliceffekt, Henk Boom and Dom2D as Les Collégiennes over the course of TOJam The Sevening, a 48h game jam (though we had a ~8h headstart on that) which took place between May 11th and 13th 2012.

Gameplay

Diluvium is a versus typing tactics game.
There are two summoners on the battlefield, and you are one of them. Type animal names to summon them, and they will attack the enemy’s spawns and ultimately the enemy summoner himself. The first to kill the other one wins, as these things usually are.

You can type up to three animal names in a row, which spawns a totem of these three animals. Each animal has its own stats : speed, attack power, health and intelligence. The totem is as intelligent as its most intelligent member, and health is summed up, but movement speed is averaged.

If someone spawns a dog on the playfield, nobody can spawn another dog until it dies. No duplicate animal! Thankfully you have 284 animal names to choose from, 100 of which are illustrated differently.

The game has a half-assed single-player mode that you can access by typing “LOCAL” in the connection screen. Otherwise, the game should work fine in LAN and over the Internet, as long as you open up the server’s port 10000 (I’m not sure whether Unity networking uses TCP or UDP, so go for both). The connection screen lets you know your LAN and WAN IPs as you host the game.

Things you can also enter at the connection prompt : “MUTE” to kill the music, “IDDQD” for degreelessness mode, and one other secret code which will be revealed elsewhere on the interwebs!

This was the second network multiplayer game I’ve worked on that uses actual Unity networking instead of a hacked up UDP sender/receiver pair. It’s SO MUCH EASIER TO SET UP! And it works consistently, no threading bugs and random Unity crashes. Knowing this makes me much more comfortable in attempting more network-multiplayer games in jams. The Cloud Is A Lie was a nightmare to keep synchronized, it would’ve been so much easier with the built-in stuff.

We had sort of an Montréal Indie Superstar version of Les Collégiennes this time at TOJam, with FRACT‘s Henk with me on code and Dom2D as an animal portraits factory for the whole weekend. Aliceffekt and Dom’s visual styles merged really well, and having all this extra super talented manpower allowed us to create a much more ambitious game. Henk happened to have working pathfinding classes just lying around, and his deeper knowledge of Unity intricacies meant less time spent fighting bugs and oddities. It was such a great jam! ^_^

Updates

Version 1.1 – 15/06/2012

Server Naming : You can now name your games and tell your friend to connect to it by name instead of IP! (IP still works, though)

Anonymatching : Create a server and wait for a user, or join an anonymous server randomly!

NAT Punchthrough : Server no longer needs to forward port 10000

Adaptative AI : In local mode, AI opponent spawns more/less units per second depending on wins/losses

Volkenessen is a game I made with Aliceffekt as Les Collégiennes on January 27-29 2012 as part of the 48h Global Game Jam. We actually slept and took the time to eat away from our computer, so based on my estimate we spent at most 30 hours making it!

It’s a two-player, physics-based 2D fighting game. Each player starts with 9 random attached items on his back, and the goal is to strip the other player of his items by beating the crap out of him. When items are removed, they clutter up the playing area, making it even more cahotic and hilarious. The washing machine and sink in the background can also fall and bounce around!

Controls

You need two gamepads (so far the Xbox wired, wireless and a Logitech generic gamepad have been tested and work [you can use the Tattiebogle driver to hook up an Xbox controller to a mac]) to play, there are no keyboard control fallback (yet). The controls are pretty exotic. To move around you can press either the D-Pad (or left analog stick) or the face buttons (A/B/X/Y), and the direction of the button does the same input as if you pressed that D-Pad direction. As you move, your player will throw a punch, kick or flail his ears to make you move as a result.

To hit the other player, you need to get close to him by hitting away from him, then hit him by moving away from him. Ramming into the opponent just doesn’t do it, you need to throw punches, and depending on the impact velocity, even that might not be enough. You can throw double-punches to make sure you land a solid hit and take off an item.

Development

It was made in Unity, with me on C# script and Aliceffekt on every asset including music and sound effects. I see it as one of our most successful jam games; it even won the judge award at our local GGJ space, and it was just so much fun to make, test and play.

I was surprised how well the rigid body physics worked out in the game. I had to use continuous physics on the players and tweak the gravity/mass to get the quick & reactive feel we wanted, but the game was basically playable 6 hours in! After that it was all tweaking the controls, adding visual feedback, determining the endgame condition and coerce the GGJ theme around the game.

I’ll be porting the game to the Arcade Royale in the coming days/weeks, and it should be a blast to play on a real arcade machine :)

Even though the game’s been out for a long while and even has an official page, I’ve never made a post about it, and now that we’ve been elected #3 Free Indie Game of 2010 on Bytejacker (!!!), now seems like a good time to spread the word!

Multiplayer underwater mayhem!

We originally made the game for Gamma IV earlier this year, and released a Windows version when the competition ended, but recently we went back and finished up the Mac and Linux versions. It’s great that porting the game didn’t involve touching any of the game code (which is in Lua, and MIT-licensed).

So whatever platform you’re running on, try the game out! It’s great fun in multiplayer, and the learning curve is almost inexistent.

How to play

You can place Projectors that redirect cells or combine them, if different cells hit the projector simultaneously.

The challenge is to combine colors at the right time, with the given resources and world layout. It becomes an intricate resource management/puzzle game, and even the simplest-looking puzzle can prove almost impossible!

There is only 13 levels in this version, which was made for a party setting. The difficulty curve proved to be very harsh for new players, and even seasoned players (like me) can’t reach the end. It’s a hard game — Aliceffekt’s trademark game design. ^_^

Science! (shot by Aliceffekt at the Prince of Arcade)

It is played with mouse+keyboard on all platforms, but also supports the Xbox 360 gamepad (either wired or wireless with an USB receiver) on Windows by using Rémi Gillig’s XInput.NET for Unity. I made my own wrapper over it to detect press/hold/down, actually the code was ripped out of my XNA code. That’s the fun part of using C# scripting, I can just share code between projects even if it’s not the same technology!

Controls

If you’re too lazy to read the tutorials :

Right click and drag to rotate the camera round the world, scrollwheel to zoom in/out

Left click to create a Projector, and left click on a face to select its direction

Z to undo the last Projector (or hover any Projector and hit Z to undo that one)

R to restart the level

Escape to return to the first Level

ALT+F4 or Command+Q to quit

Hope you like it, it was a a lot of fun to make and I’m already looking forward to my next Unity creation… It’s a great work environment.